The term “georeferenced” or “location-referenced” information is generally used to describe information that is defined or characterized in some fashion by a physical location to which the information relates. For example, georeferenced information may be information that has been associated with a particular physical location in terms of a map projection or coordinate system.
In the context of motor vehicle navigation systems, georeferenced information is of course used extensively to provide the driver with information regarding street/road topologies, points of interest, naturally occurring physical structures, etc. Moreover, the use of predictive information has been used in motor vehicles in the context of adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems mainly in the form of information concerning road or street types situated ahead for the speed control.
Other forms of predictive information have been used to update map information in a vehicle's navigation system, for example. Such information may include traffic conditions, weather conditions, etc. However, when distributing such merged map information by way of a backend system across a fleet of vehicles over a wireless communication system, a large communication bandwidth is required. This is undesirable because it leads to high transmission costs. Furthermore, it is inevitable that at least some of the transmitted information will have no relevance to a particular vehicle operator because it relates, for example, to a different location.
Therefore, there is a need for providing georeferenced predictive information to a motor vehicle using an improved methodology.